High thermal conductivity of a hydrogenated amorphous silicon film

Abstract

We measured the thermal conductivity kappa of an 80 microm thick hydrogenated amorphous silicon film prepared by hot-wire chemical-vapor deposition with the 3omega (80-300 K) and the time-domain thermo-reflectance (300 K) methods. The kappa is higher than any of the previous temperature dependent measurements and shows a strong phonon mean free path dependence. We also applied a Kubo based theory using a tight-binding method on three 1000 atom continuous random network models. The theory gives higher kappa for more ordered models, but not high enough to explain our results, even after extrapolating to lower frequencies with a Boltzmann approach. Our results show that this material is more ordered than any amorphous silicon previously studied.